Homing

Recently I moved. I have moved more than a dozen times in the last two decades. And I have moved from city-to-city, country-to-country. You could call me a veteran at moving.

Except that it didn’t get easier. In fact, just the opposite. Each time I have packed up a home, I have been emotional. Each time I have unpacked, I have been either paralysed for weeks/months or distraught.

This time too I started with a feeling of dread about the oncoming move. Worse, something in my new home didn’t feel okay. I began to explore what of the new home disturbed me.

Here is what I found out – although I am highly creative, I am also ultra-logical. Which meant the rooms and their arrangement had to have a well-thought out sequence. On the other hand, the lady who built the home was more interested in keeping it Vaastu compliant. That meant a corridor was weirdly cut, the living room had a strange sit out in the corner, the kitchen was not arranged for the comfort of a cook, the bathroom was well… And where to connect the washing machine?

No, it had several positive qualities. Plenty of light and air, greenery in the backyard and it is quiet and sweet. It is close to a park and I can skip down to a popular street nearby at will.

But the strange cut-outs of the room and the impractical arrangement of fixtures bothered me.

I was getting emotional enough to end the idea of moving.

Thankfully I called friends to help me think through the situation. And the conversations helped me sit on what was happening.

This is when I realized something else.

That finding homes, settling in homes is like a relationship. It is not an exact 100% match. It is a somewhat compatible possibility.

And like relationships, one has to accept the spaces and fixtures that doesn’t match with your worldview. One has to work with it, embrace it, love it, so it grows with you.

I realized how obstinate and demanding I had been about what I wanted. That I was bothered by my own high expectations. And that it extended beyond home to other aspects of life.

What I did was to immediately take possession of the house, cleaned it and then sat lovingly in each corner of the house that bothered me. I looked at it with a different lens, wondering how I could transform that space, till that area became a place of creative possibilities.

When I finally moved my furniture, for the first time in my life, I finished unpacking and settling in by the same evening. What is more, within a day I received a guest (a close friend).

And more. It has been my best first month in any home till now. Each day I wake up so happy, even when other areas of life are not so rosy.

Because now I realized, it is not about the home, it is about how I receive and work with it in my mind.

And at long last, I homed.